Intimacy
by thisisforyou
Summary: "You're not his friend. He doesn't have friends. So what are you?" An exploration of friendly moments in Sherlock's relationships with others. One: Mrs Hudson. Two: Molly, minor S2 spoilers.
1. Mrs Hudson

**A/N: This will eventually be a series of one-shots, each showing glimpses of Sherlock's relationships with other characters. Basically just fluffy. I have ideas for Mycroft, Angelo, and Molly; I'm not sure if I want to do John or Lestrade, but I guess we'll see. I'm trying to stick with characters shown in BBC verse and not bring any new ACD canon into it, but any ideas you might have would be welcome! This one, of course, is Mrs Hudson.**

**Prompt for this one: Henry Hall's **_**It's Time To Say Goodnight**_**, a slow waltz popular in the 1930s. Makes me cry every time.  
>-for you!<strong>

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><p>Mrs Hudson glances at the clock again. It's eleven-thirty, an hour since Doctor Watson – always steadfast in his habits – retired to the upstairs bedroom. She knows she should be heading that way, too; she's not as young as she used to be, and her bad hip has started to throb from the exertion with which she's been tapping her foot for the past three hours. But the banging and crashing and general mayhem of Sherlock upstairs is missing, and that always makes it hard to sleep.<p>

She worries about him so. She tries not to, of course, knowing that it's futile. She can mother him till the cows come home and he'll never listen. He's a grown man, too, she knows he can take care of himself. And everyone else, for that matter; he'd been an absolute sweetheart in Florida over that little business with Mr Hudson. But there have been times where he hasn't looked after himself, she can tell, so it's nice to keep him close.

Doctor Watson's good for him, too. Such a gentleman, the young doctor, and a firm believer in the liberal application of Earl Grey and chocolate digestives. A man of her own heart, indeed. But sometimes it takes a mother's touch, and of course men of such different temperaments cannot be expected to get along all the time.

The bang of the front door is startlingly loud; she jumps and looks at the clock again. 11:53. The door flies on its hinges, slamming against the wall and bouncing back to close sharply behind the whirlwind that is Sherlock Holmes. She breathes a sigh of relief that ends with a catch as she hears the _flump_ of a body hitting the closed door.

She can't help herself; she opens her door and steps out into the hallway. She's got too much invested in the boy by now. "Sherlock, dear," she begins, but stops when she sees his face.

It's been all-ruddy-go for Sherlock since August, and he's hardly stopped for breath in the last six weeks. Because Sherlock _doesn't _stop for breath. He usually doesn't have to. Right now, though, his usually pale face is positively ashen, and the detective really does look to be on his last gasp. "Good heavens, dear, what've you done this time?"

Sherlock looks at her and his formerly shining grey eyes are dull and alarmingly blank. "I'm fine," he lies blatantly, attempting to take a step forwards and staggering, his eyes unfocussed. She rushes forwards to catch him.

"I'm a lot more intelligent than you give me credit for, dear," she defers, effectively picking him up an carrying him into her flat. He flops down onto the sofa. "Tea," she insists, leaving him for a moment to fill the kettle. When she comes back, his eyes are closed and his face twisted into a hurt expression that nearly breaks her heart.

"Sherlock?" she pats his face gently and he opens his eyes; she sits down beside him and takes his face in her hands. "Sherlock, dear, when was the last time you slept?"

He blinks at her a few times, fatigue seeping tangibly out of every pore in his face. "Tuesday," he guesses quietly. "Or maybe Wednesday. I don't remember."

She sighs. "Tea," she repeats. "And a bit of cake. Then sleep." He makes a vague noise that sounds like assent. She sets a cup of tea and a large slice of tea-cake in front of him and watches him stare at them for a while before he starts to pick at the cake and take a few hesitant sips of tea. "I think you should tell me what happened, young man."

Sherlock takes a bigger gulp from his teacup, staring blankly into it. "I was too late," he says hollowly. "You remember the man who came yesterday, the footballer? Tall, blonde, well-built… well, his wife was being threatened, she had some stuff with her past she wasn't telling him, and the threats were in this code… it was nothing I'd ever seen before, and by the time I figured out they were death threats he'd already been murdered."

"Oh, Sherlock, love," she can't help but whisper at the lost look in his eyes. "You can't save everybody."

"I know," he snaps, draining his tea and reluctantly shovelling the last of the cake past the pale cupids-bow. Bless him, but she's never seen him eat with actual gusto, always with an expression that says he's rather not. "But I thought… this code, they looked like children's drawings. I didn't think they'd actually murder anyone. If I'd been a little bit quicker, he wouldn't have died and she wouldn't be in hospital. It can't have happened half an hour before I got there."

People think Sherlock Holmes is heartless. They don't know him. He shuts things out as best he can, but things still hurt – when people use his friends against him, when people he knows get hurt, when he doesn't make it in time. For a moment in this new loss, Mrs Hudson thinks Sherlock might be about to cry. She quickly presses his head to her chest and holds him like a mother rocking a small child. Sherlock doesn't have any family, except that tall thing with the umbrella who always seems so unwelcome. He stiffens as he finds his face suddenly buried in his landlady's bosom, but soon relaxes into the embrace. "You need to sleep, love."

Sherlock sniffs. "I don't know if I can."

"Shh," she counsels. "Lie down."

He nudges his shoes off and flicks his feet up until his head rests on her lap, the rest of his long, pale body stretched out on the sofa. She strokes his head gently; his body is actually trembling with fatigue. She remembers, oddly, her husband, those nights when he would come home exhausted and shaking and she'd always blamed the work, not knowing of the adulterous, violent double-life he was leading. He would lie on their bed, and she would rock him and sing him to sleep. Usually when she thinks about it she feels nauseated, but tonight with Sherlock's head in her lap the old lullaby plays relentlessly in her head, and of course if slips through her lips before she can stop it.

"_It's time to say goodnight, and it's time to close your eyes  
>Let's put out the light, till the dawn breaks through the skies<em>

"_While long shadows creep, may your dreams be sweet and bright  
>In a moment you'll be sound asleep, it's time to say goodnight."<em>

When she looks down, the consulting detective is asleep, soft child-like breaths pooling on her knees. He looks positively adorable in the arms of Morpheus, she decides, all the worry he carts around with him during the day wiped blank from his delicate face. She smiles, and gently edges her way out from underneath him.

She knows Doctor Watson will worry when he wakes up and his flatmate still isn't there, so she fishes in the depths of her purse to find the cellphone she never uses and sends him a text.

_Sherlock sleeping here tonight. Don't worry. –Mrs Hudson_

She digs a tattered blanket out of the linen cupboard and throws it over Sherlock's tangled limbs, tucking the edges around him tenderly. Under her touch, he wriggles contentedly, the edges of his delicate lips turning up in a smile just like a child being kissed goodnight. In a final gesture of motherliness – for some reason the consulting detective draw them out of her in spades – she bends down and presses a kiss on his forehead.

As she reaches the door to her bedroom the cellphone chimes in her hands. She looks at it and smiles; the words drift from her lips before she can stop them. "Bless you, Doctor Watson." It seems he hasn't been sleeping without Sherlock either.

_Mrs Hudson, you're a saint. -John_


	2. Molly

**Prompt: "I think if Sherlock was going to date anyone it'd be Molly. I mean, she has the most to give him."  
>I wrote most of this before I saw <em>A Scandal in Belgravia<em>. Then I had to go back and rework it because that moment was… I mean, I saw it coming a mile off and yet it was still so _moving_. It's probably a bit not good that that's the moment that stuck with me, right? I naturally want to revise my Mrs Hudson one, too, but there you go.**

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><p>Molly Hooper stared at the man opposite her, gnawing anxiously on a fingernail. She hadn't bitten her fingernails since she was nine and her mother offered her a Holiday Barbie if she stopped. To say that today she was nervous would be a grievous understatement. She was terrified.<p>

From time to time Molly thought she was getting better at controlling herself around Sherlock Holmes. Then he'd compliment her or hug her in a fit of exuberance and her thoughts would be reduced to white noise and _Oh he's so perfect _and she'd realise that actually, she was just as hopelessly in love with him now as she had been that first day she'd met him.

_She'd been daydreaming. Well, her boss had called it daydreaming, but really what she'd been doing was thinking about her boyfriend, the one who didn't care about her and got drunk too often and shouted at her. He'd never hit her, but he didn't have to; it's the thought that counts. She wondered almost every day if maybe she should leave him, but she didn't think she'd ever find anyone else._

"_Molly, right?" _ _She looked up from her paperwork and nearly died. For the stupidest of moments she thought she _had_ died, and in front of her was an angel here to take her to wherever she was supposed to go. She wasn't sure she'd been good enough to go to Heaven. She still felt guilty for dropping her brother's goldfish down the sink by accident ten years ago. Did angels usually wear black trench coats and purple scarves? Because this one was._

"_Um," she stuttered helplessly. "Yeah?"_

_The angel held out a gloved hand. Nothing she'd ever read about angels had said anything about expensive leather biker's gloves with holes cut in the knuckles for ease of movement. "Sherlock Holmes." Molly took the soft leather in her hand and shook it delicately. "I'm working with Detective Sergeant Wainwright on the Patrick Carter case. I was wondering if I could have a look at the body?" _

_As he made the request, his soft eyes – were they blue or green? – seemed to widen and grow and take on distinctly infantile qualities. She blinked. He wasn't an angel, she told herself sternly. He was a busybody. _

_An extremely good-looking busybody, her brain interjected. She tried to ignore it, but it was very persistent. And loud. "Um… I don't think I can do that for you. I've already put the paperwork through, the family's taking him tomorrow." _

_Sherlock Holmes had frowned in a friendly sort of manner. "It's rather late, isn't it? You must be so dedicated to your work to still be here finishing your paperwork. I'm terrible with documentation, I never get it done; I admire anyone who has the discipline for something so dull."_

_She was smiling girlishly before she had the chance to wonder whether that could have been an insult in disguise. Surely wheeling old Mr Carter out one last time wasn't going to make any difference? It wasn't like Sherlock was about to cut him open or anything, right? "Well… just this once." _

_He'd smiled in such delight it had made her heart glad; she'd been unable to stop herself watching as he inspected every inch of Patrick Carter's body with a pocket magnifier, watching the dip and flare of his spidery black eyelashes, arguing with herself over the colour of his eyes, the speed of his fingertips, the hum of his deep, honeyed voice as he muttered to himself. _

_Perhaps he was a nutter. But his face, his flawless skin, his voice… he was perfection. And Molly was lost. _

_As he turned to leave with many emphatic thank-yous, he looked over his shoulder and frowned at her. "Oh, and Molly?" he'd said lightly. "You _should_ leave him. Of course you can do _much_ better than him."_

Sherlock sat opposite her at the sandalwood table, stirring two sugars into his long black with practised, absent-minded flicks of his elegant fingers. She couldn't take her eyes off them. When he'd asked her to meet him here, she'd gone through about five different stages of denial.

He'd been _so_ rude about Jim. And of course that had been the last in a string of rudenesses that had just become too much. She knew he was just using her, had known it for the entire length of their working relationship. She'd had enough of being used. It didn't matter that Jim was now wanted for murder, kidnapping, extortion, and commercial fraud. What mattered was that he was her boyfriend, and Sherlock had ruined it for her.

And then there was Christmas. _Christmas_… just the thought of it brought tears to her eyes. It wasn't even the humiliation of having everyone there, of seeing Doctor Watson's face and realising that he _knew_ what the name on the label would be before Sherlock even picked up the present. It was his reaction; the silence, the apology, the gentle peck on the cheek. It was like he'd never even _realised_ that he was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. What made her cry was the fact that she had no-one to cry _to_ – she'd invested all her tomorrows in the only one who ever _made_ her cry.

He'd said he wanted to apologise. She tried to convince herself that was why she agreed to meet him, because she wanted to hear him apologise; it didn't work, because she knew that wasn't it at all, that she couldn't bear the thought of not being civil with him, even if it would mean fewer late nights at the morgue and hasty excuses to her superiors as to why this corpse had been filleted or that kidney soaked in ammonia.

It was always so hard to take her eyes off him. She knew she was staring because he was giving her that _you're staring_ look, and she couldn't help it. She felt like a stiff breeze might blow her over.

Finally he put the Styrofoam cup aside and leaned towards her on his elbows. "Molly," he began, adopting that face that she'd seen him wear like a mask, dropping it when he thought she wasn't looking. The friendly face.

"No, Sherlock, hang on," she said in a sudden burst of confidence. "You're doing that face."

He looked around like he didn't know which face she was talking about. Apparently it was quite possible he _didn't_; she'd read an article in some women's magazine once about people who manipulate and lie without even realising it. The ease with which he did such things made her think maybe he was one of them. If he wasn't doing it on purpose, she couldn't really not forgive him.

She realised he was doing it again, manipulating her without even speaking, and stopped the train of thought abruptly. "Don't think I haven't noticed that your face changes when you want something. If you're going to apologise, I want a proper apology, not a false one that you're only doing because you want access to the morgue and batting your eyelashes at me is quicker than paperwork."

He smiled suddenly. "You're learning," he said wryly. She grinned back; was that a compliment? Was he only doing it because he knew compliments tore apart her already pathetic defences? "All right. I was wrong about Jim, I was stupid. Not only was he not gay but he turned out to be a criminal mastermind. I'll ignore for now the fact that I was therefore right to tell you to dump him. Molly, I… um…"

Until then he had been speaking in a quick, rehearsed tone that either meant that he had thought long and hard about what he wanted to say, or that he was trying to get it over with as fast and unemotionally as he could. But at his last sentence he faltered and then stopped. "I'm not… good with relationships and things. John had to tell me why you were upset because I didn't understand – all I knew was that if _I_ was in your position, I would want to be told. Not that I wouldn't already know," he added, slightly contemptuously. Molly knew that this last comment was supposed to make her angry, but she giggled instead. "I didn't mean to upset you. John says you might not believe this, but I was honestly trying to help."

It had been a question in high-school English Literature after a study of _Othello_, after the Temptation scene lesson. _If your boyfriend/girlfriend was cheating on you, would you want to be told? _Ninety percent of the class had said yes. Molly had sympathised with Othello and agreed that if you didn't know you could still be happy. The moment you knew about it, you had to do something.

She wasn't sure whether she felt sorry for Sherlock or not. She'd always assumed he was… well, normal. Assumed he had a girlfriend, or had his eye on someone, or just wasn't interested in that _right now_. She hadn't thought he was so entirely ignorant of social protocol that someone else had to tell him when he'd done something wrong. "I guess it doesn't matter," she said quietly. "Like you said, it turned out he was a psychopath anyway."

"And then about what I did at Christmas." Sherlock stopped, and the silence stretched on as he stared at her. "Molly," he said suddenly, "you know I like you, right?"

Her heart had a panic attack and passed out. "Wh-what? But you're just pretending – you're only nice to me because you want something and you know if you compliment me or notice my hair or do _anything _that could look like you're interested in me I'll give you anything you want! You only _know_ me because I'm a pushover!"

It felt strange to be saying it, but they both knew – hell, _everyone_ knew it was the truth. Sherlock put his coffee down, looking genuinely embarrassed. "Well, yes," he admitted. "I do ham things up a bit for you for that reason, but I do actually think you're a good person. I mean…" he sighed. "You're the closest thing to a friend I have, apart from John now, and even though that might not mean _a lot _to me, it still means _something._"

Molly didn't know what to say. "Um…"

When she didn't elaborate, he kept going. "I really do think you can do better than a psychopath, or a druggie, or an alcoholic, or all the other no-hopers you've settled for in the time I've known you, Molly. You're smart, and pretty, and kind, and you deserve someone who appreciates that." He stopped and stared out the window as, ironically, a couple waltzed past, arm in arm, his face buried in her frizzy blonde hair. "At Christmas I…"

"I don't want to talk about Christmas," Molly interrupted quietly, trying to fight the tears. "Let's just put it behind us."

Sherlock bent his head to study her face, a look of such intense concentration on his face. Molly had seen that look before, but never directed at _her_. It was intimidating, being in the beam of this man's full attention. She tried to meet his eyes, but had to break the contact and wipe the tears from her eyes after a few moments. Then Sherlock nodded, a brief, sharp jerk of his elegant head, down and then up again.

"Molly," he said quietly, taking her hand across the table. She stared at the point of contact, trying to remember how to breathe, how to blink, how to pretend she was still alive. "If… If I was going to date _anybody_, it'd be you."

It took a few moments before the words sank in, and even when they did she wasn't sure if she could believe them. She looked up at him, her very eyes shaking in their sockets. His hand shifted in hers. "I'd be a terrible boyfriend. Ask John. You'd lose interest quickly enough, Molly, trust me. Even if I wanted to, I could never live up to what you've dreamed me into."

Molly knew it was true. She'd been blindly in love with Sherlock for so long now that her dreams became wilder and wilder; what she fashioned the consulting detective into was nothing like the man sitting opposite her. Hers was softer, kinder, more loving. More fairytale. She tried to smile. "Sorry."

His thumb twitched out to stroke her hand and his head ducked further down as though he were trying to see her face under her fringe as she stared at the floor. "That should be my line, Molly." His phone chimed from his pocket and she knew without looking that her time with him was up, so she pulled her hand from his before he had a chance to make the move. She wasn't sure whether she was doing it to save him the awkwardness of having to do it or herself the embarrassment of having her hand still sit there, twitching, trying desperately to remember what the touch of his skin had felt like.

"I'll see you around, then?" she asked, trying to keep her voice casual and cheerful. He looked at the phone, then at her. She smiled in what she prayed was a reassuring manner. He smiled back.

"I hope so." He stood up, the harsh noise of the chair grating on her ears. "Oh, and Molly," he said, after he had re-donned his coat, fingers buried in the soft fabric of his scarf. She looked up. He was smiling again. "Thank you for the gift. It was… perfect."


End file.
